Vulfpeck Releases An Album Of Absolute Silence On Spotify To Make Money

0

Funk band Vulfpeck is showing everyone what growth hacking is all about — exploiting weaknesses to promote your work. The band recently released a new album on Spotify called Sleepify. It consists of 10 songs comprised entirely of silence. Each song is 31 or 32 seconds long. Not coincidentally, Spotify pays royalties when someone listens to a song for more than 30 seconds.

In a video, the band explains that it wants to try something new for its next tour. In order to raise a bit of money, Vulfpeck is counting on its fans to stream its songs on Spotify. But playing an album on repeat is just not that efficient.

Vulfpeck asks its fans to stream the newly released album on repeat while they sleep. It’s a way to generate a few dollars in royalties every night and a great way to show one of Spotify’s loopholes.

Whether a song lasts 3 minutes or 12 minutes, the band gets the same royalty payment from Spotify. According to Spotify itself, labels and publishers can expect between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream. Then, it depends on the deal between a band and its label.

You can see on Spotify that Sleepify is distributed by Vulf Records. Vulfpeck is probably behind this label. This way, the band gets all the royalty payouts. For seven hours of sleep, you can stream 840 times 30-second tracks. With an average payout of $0.0072 per stream, the band can expect around $6.05 per fan per night. Nothing to be ashamed of.

If the band is successful enough, Vulfpeck says it will go on a tour without charging admission. Spotify provides analytics as well, letting Vulfpeck pick its tour dates depending on where Sleepify is popular.

And what if it doesn’t work? It’s still a great promotional stunt for the band. Let’s just hope that Vulfpeck is the exception, not the rule. Otherwise, Spotify will have a hard time generating profits.

0

Crunchbase

OverviewSpotify is a commercial music streaming service that provides restricted digital content from a range of record labels and artists. Users can browse through the interface by artist, album, genre, playlist, record label, and direct searches.
It also enables individuals to create, share, and edit playlists with other users. If users want recommendations, they can integrate their system with Last.fm, …